And at long last, the Hexcrawl essay draws to a close. As a final parting gift, I offer up two cheat sheets for running your own hexcrawls.

The Basic Cheat Sheet offers the stripped down core of the game structure. If you occasionally found your eyes glazing over during the previous 12 installments, this is probably the cheat sheet for you: Just basic navigation, encounter checks, and hex movement.

The Advanced Cheat Sheet is the full package: It includes the full watch checklist, the robust encounter system, the ability for characters to become lost, all the modes of travel, terrain modifiers, foraging rules, and tracking. The whole nine yards. (The tenth yard is the one where you make an awesome campaign out of it.)

Of course, you can also selectively pick-and-choose from the advanced elements, deciding what stuff you want to incorporate into the basic system.

I’m about to run a HexCrawl for the first time after 25 years of narrative campaigns. I’m a little lost and daunted by the prospect but your advice has given me a plan for taking the first bite of that elephant.

[…] version of how to put together this kind of open world adventure and finishes with a useful set of cheat-sheets. Also referenced is Ars Ludi’s Grand Experiments: West Marches, which prompting the idea for […]

Justin, I know I’m late to the party, but I hope you can elaborate a bit on how to read the “distance traveled” section of the PDF (“Speed and Distance” chart on Part 2 of the blog). If the players walk for 1 hour, which column gets used? Example: Players are walking for 4 hours, which under “10 ft.” would mean they travel 4 miles. Under “20 ft.” they’re traveling for 8 miles. I’m not understanding what the “feet” are used for here, because surely we aren’t measuring such small distances over lengths of time that number in hours, right? Thanks!